It took me a few years and a lot of work to get to a point where I was comfortable dressing in more feminine and more “revealing” clothing. For me, owning my body and owning my choices meant learning how to mimic and play at those gender expressions disregarded as “typically feminine.” I had to teach myself how to do make up, to do my hair, to be comfortable in dresses and “fancy” clothing. Modesty culture, in its attempts to protect my womanhood, had robbed me of my understanding of myself as a feminine being.

Purity culture does not exist without gender roles - they are an endless recursive set of stairs building upon each other. Purity means following your role as a woman and following your role as a woman makes you pure. Purity means following your role as a man and following your role as a man makes you pure. Rejecting gender roles in romantic relationships means rejecting at least a major part of purity culture. Becoming a woman who asks men out on dates makes you aggressive, which is immodest and impure. Becoming a man who allows his romantic partner to lead every so often makes you weak and therefore more susceptible to temptation - and therefore impure. It's an endless recursion in the logic.

At the root of this fear of emasculation and fear of men displaying womanly traits is a fear of the feminine. We police both genders harshly, but young boys, pushed to be leaders and providers and strong emotionless robots, get a raw deal. This kind of toxic masculinity depends on the demonization of anything female – which extends to things like close friendship with women, close friendships with male friends (because no homo!), and any exploration of feminine traits when a connection to those traits may help to make for a more well-rounded person altogether. Men are to be solitary strengths, because admitting needs is feminine and weak. And the burden this places on both men and women creates an untenable vision of masculinity and a hatred for femininity. We create misogyny – it is not born of nothing.